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ABOUT THIS IMAGE:

This is a false-color view of a planetary debris
disk encircling the star HD 107146, a yellow dwarf star very similar
to our Sun, though it is much younger (between 30 and 250 million
years old, compared to the almost 5 billion years age of the Sun).
The star is 88 light-years away from Earth. This is the only disk to
have been imaged around a star so much like our own. The slight difference
in brightness on one side of the disk is due to the fact that small dust
particles scatter more light when they are between Earth and the star,
rather than behind the star. This suggests that the bright side is
closer to us. The disk is redder than the star whose light it reflects,
indicating that it contains grains one two-thousandth of a millimeter
in size (about 100 times smaller than household dust).

Our Sun is believed to have a ring of dust around it, lying just beyond
the orbit of Neptune, although it is ten times narrower than the one
around HD 107146. Our solar system also has between 1,000 and 10,000
times less dust. The size of the ring, its the thickness, and the amount
of dust make it unlikely that HD 107146 will ever evolve into a system
like our own. This is interesting, as it shows that the planetary
systems around the same kind of stars may have very different
evolutionary paths.